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Waffling on Muzzling the Mullahs

PARIS — The United States’ notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to cost the mullahs a half-hour’s lost sleep.

Is this a descending spiral of resolve fated to result in sanctions that pinch, nip or tweak?

Over the long haul, if the United States acts alone or with a handful of Western friends to curb Iran’s drive toward nuclear weapons, perhaps not. But for now, as the administration tries in the manner of George W. Bush to haul Russia and China on board for their fourth set of Security Council sanctions since 2006 (grade them so far from ineffectual to meaningless), the answer became clearer in the margins of the meeting in Prague last week between President Barack Obama and Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president of Russia.

Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, offered it up three separate times, with minor changes in diction, at a news briefing. He said, “Sanctions that would cause grave humanitarian concerns to the Iranian people, we’re not interested in that.”

Which means the United States could seem to some of its allies to be shying away from pressing the United Nations to adopt extensive sanctions on the export of refined petroleum products to Iran.

That is exactly the opposite of the approach voted by the U.S. House of Representatives, 412 to 12, when it passed a bill that would authorize the president to penalize any company or body shipping gasoline to Iran. The bill was described by the House Democratic leadership as aiming at Iran’s “Achilles’ heel” because imports account for 40 percent of the fuel used by the country’s car and trucks.

As laid out by Mr. Rhodes, the American position sounded a lot like what Russia said about a “total embargo” — although no one ever called for one — on exports of refined petroleum products (read gasoline and diesel fuel) to Iran. In the great tradition of Russia’s never threatening cutoffs in supplies to its natural gas clients, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov explained that blocking deliveries would be “a huge shock” to Iranian society and is “something we are definitely not prepared to consider.”

Arguably, there’s no crippling blow or even a bite here. Instead, you get something that looks like incoherence.

And you can question what sense there is in preemptively disqualifying via dubious moralizing a type of sanction that both the House and, more recently, the Senate have suggested is the smartest way to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons plans. America’s allies could still consider restricting Iran’s supply of gasoline in following up on a new (although limited) Security Council resolution with harder European or ad hoc sanctions. But resistance to them will be greater because of the United States’ present contradictory take on gasoline supplies.

Besides, if we’re dealing in morality on serious methods for depriving Iran of nuclear weapons capability or a bomb, lowering the level of gasoline exports to Iran instead of carrying out airstrikes on presumed nuclear installations would seem to be a far preferable “humanitarian” approach (Mr. Rhodes’ word) for both Iranians and the U.S. military.

The French, who are pretty consistently tough on Iran, appeared truly irritated a few months back when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in moving away from her call for crippling sanctions, expressed a preference for sanctions that would “not contribute to the suffering of ordinary Iranians.”

Tactically, that may have been related to American intelligence findings leading Gen. David H. Petraeus to assure the world it would not encounter a nuclear-capable Iran “this calendar year.” But Le Monde reported that French diplomats, without referring to Mrs. Clinton, said concerns like those she expressed were “exaggerated or baseless.”

In the event, the French wound up putting gasoline export sanctions in a draft resolution they circulated for consideration in New York. An American draft did not include them, but the Americans acknowledged in Prague last week that energy issues were not off the table and came under discussion there with the Russians.

So, noting their humanitarian motivations on gasoline, what have the Russians, the mullahs’ main supplier of arms and nuclear wherewithal, given back in terms of help on Iran in exchange for Mr. Obama’s reset of relations?

A recent draft of new U.N. sanctions was initially reported to include a full ban on supplying arms to Iran and recommend a full inspection regime, but according to Reuters, the Russians stopped it short, while saying “they could live with a call for ‘vigilance’ over the weapons trade.”

Ah, vigilance. It’s also the word, open to a hundred interpretations, that has come under discussion as a substitute for U.N. sanctions banning transactions involving Iran’s central bank.

With all its vagueness, vigilance now has a place in the major league of fuzziness alongside “unacceptable,” the term used by the United States and its friends concerning Iran’s eventually achieving nuclear weapons status. No course in diplomatic exegesis is required to think that’s an awful long way from saying, “We won’t allow it.”

For Thérèse Delpech, the French Atomic Energy Commission’s director of strategic affairs, the circumstances show “the Russians are playing with Monopoly money on the subject of sanctions on banks or arms or gasoline while the Americans stand by and smile. If there are U.N. sanctions, they will be minimal.”

There’s not much of a leap — although Ms. Delpech did not say it — from this view on the likelihood of enacting punitive sanctions on a country that has spent billions on developing atomic weapons, and is on the edge of success, to a notion in the international foreign policy community that the Obama administration plans in the end to deal with a nuclear-capable or nuclear-armed Iran through a policy of containment.

Washington denies it.

But if you scorn the gasoline sanctions that look to many like the best nonbelligerent shot you’ve got to spook the mullahs (after all, they came to power after a strike closing gas pumps demonstrated the impotence of the shah’s regime), then Iran may well think it has scant reason to believe the United States’ still-official bottom line: that when it comes to stopping the Iranian nuclear drive, all of America’s options remain open.